Response to Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu claims that globalisation (the effect of which he deplores) is ‘the precise result, not of economic inevitability, but of a politics, conscious and calculated, which has led.. governments... to divest themselves of the power to control economic forces.’ He proposes, by way of resistance, ‘the construction of a unified Social Europe’, and seems to envisage this unified Social Europe on the model of the socialist project for the European Union - sweetening the pill, however, with a whiff of nostalgia for the old Trade Union movement. He also evokes ‘social movements’ as instruments of resistance to the global threat, but identifies no such movement by name, constitution or purpose. He offers a form of resistance (in soixante-huitard language) without the content.

Here are some social movements, in the British context, that are trying to oppose the adverse effects of globalisation: the Countryside Alliance, fighting to defend the intensely localised hunting communities against globalised moralism; Farmers for Action, fighting to preserve fair prices for British farmers against unfair competition from the global food economy; The Small and Family Farmers Association, fighting to prevent the takeover of the family farm by global agribusiness; Business for Sterling, fighting to preserve our local currency and the forms of localised taxation enshrined in it; the Council for the Protection of Rural England, fighting the proposal to centralise planning and to put the infrastructure required by the global economy before the interests of the local community; the Victorian Society, fighting to preserve the shattered remnants of our great Victorian cities against the depredations of international modernism; the National Trust, fighting to preserve the English landscape as an icon of England - and a thousand others from the League of St George to the West Country Concertina Players whose goal is to maintain, preserve and protect local identity against global uniformity.

How such movements are to benefit from the new ‘Social Europe’ is anybody’s guess. But so far the European project has involved precisely what Bourdieu deplores - namely governments progressively divesting themselves of ‘the power to control economic forces’. After all, the European Union was established with an economic agenda; it has arrogated to itself unlimited legislative powers, in the forms of directives which cannot be amended by national governments; and it has vested those powers in unaccountable bureaucrats whose position and networks of influence make them tools in the hands of multi-national companies. Without some concrete proposals as to how the European process - announced on all sides as ‘inevitable’, ‘historically necessary’, and so on - is to be deflected away from globalisation, when its whole tendency is to centralize powers previously exercised nationally, and to impose a culture of centralised regulation throughout the continent, Bourdieu’s call to resistance is empty.

Bourdieu singles out the WTO as an example of the deliberate expropriation of legislative powers in the interests of global capitalism. He is of course right. But the EU works in the same direction; so does the ILO, the IMF, UNCTAD, the World Bank, and a hundred others, all working to legislate without accountability. The correct way to oppose them is not by more international movements, however ‘social’ in their aim, since these would merely lead to more legislation from more unaccountable bodies. The way forward is surely a way backward - to national sovereignty, accountable to a national electorate, of the kind once enjoyed by France.